Ten Years of the DH(d) and its Disciplines



Christof Schöch
Trier University, Germany

Disciplinary Transformations?
Humanities Impact on Reshaping the Digital Humanities
Internationales Wissenschaftsforum – Heidelberg

12 Jun 2025



Opening: What’s the issue?







An anecdote to start with…

The topic: Ten Years of DH(d) and its Disciplines

  • What is the ‘DH(d)’?
    • An association
    • A community of practicioners
    • A (regional realization of a) discipline
  • The (etablished) ‘disciplines’
    • In the Humanities
    • As well as on the ‘digital side’

Questions raised by the relationship between DHd and the disciplines

  • Is DH a discipline, a trans-discipline, an assemblage of disciplines, or what?
  • What is the disciplinary makeup of the DH(d) community?
  • Whose disciplinarity are we considering? Individuals vs. community

The impossible talk

Overview

  • 1 – Opening: What’s the issue?
  • 2 – DH(d) as a discipline?
  • 3 – DHd and the disciplines
  • 4 – Conclusion

DH(d) as a discipline?

DH(d) has all the hallmarks of a discipline

  • Associations: 2 in DACH, 34 worldwide
  • Journals: 5 in DACH, 60+ worldwide
  • Professorships: 40+ in Germany, many worldwide
  • Study programs: 85 in DACH, 202+ worldwide
  • Centers and initiatives: 40 in DACH, at least 240 worldwide

(Source: Mapping DH, 2025, and its sources.)

DHd (as an association and a community) is doing fine!

  • Since DHd’s foundation in 2012, membership grows continually
  • Currently, DHd stands at around 550 members
  • Community of practicioners is much larger

Another sign of ‘disciplineness’: recent interest in the history of DH(d)

  • 2024: History of Digital History in Paris
  • 2025: Panel on History of Science and Digital Humanities at DHd2025 + Task Force ‘History of DHd’
  • 2026: History of Digital History at Uni Luxemburg

 

The disciplines within DH(d)

Of course, DH(d) is not uniform, but diverse

Exhibit #1: The DHd Working Groups (17!)

Exhibit #2: The DHd conference’s difficult relationship with disciplinarity

Exhibit #3: Disciplinary scope of DH professorships, 2008–2024+

Exhibit #4: The disciplinary makeup of the DHd community

  • Fachgebiete
  • Fachkollegien
  • Fächer

Exhibit #5: DH generally or DH with a disciplinary focus? View over time

“Here we can also observe that besides the professorships called ‘Discipline X plus Digital Humanities’, more and more of them simply have the denomination ‘Digital Humanities’. (Sahle 2015)

Conclusions and things we can do next

What can we conclude from the (limited) data?

  • Institutionally: DH(d) = a discipline
    • Helpful for visibility and voice
  • In practice, it’s more complex
    • DH: an umbrella-trans-discipline covering parts of many individual disciplines
    • Alternative structurings, e.g. through methods used across objects
    • More ‘Digital X’ than ‘DH generally’

DFG: Fachteil vs. Fach vs. Fachkollegium

Next steps: Collect data!

  • Who are the people doing DH(d)
  • Disciplinary background and identity
  • Disciplinarity of DH centers
  • Disciplinarity of DH leadership
  • Where does DH(d) come from
  • Where is DH(d) headed




Thank you! Dankeschön!